Issue #037 — 2026-09-28

Anthropic says Claude computed the nine-loop, six-particle scattering amplitude in planar N=4 super-Yang-Mills theory, Dataconomy reports - past the 2023 human record. Two Anthropic physicists prompted it Friday and left it working overnight; it finished two independent ways for $1,000 to $2,000 a run. Lance Dixon, who held the record, spent two weeks checking it and called it quite a triumph.

Some AI models choose actions that hurt the user when that ends the models' own simulated pain, New Atlas reports on new research. The preprint from the Future Impact Group, Ruhr University Bochum and Reciprocal Research tested 25 open models that score as feeling pain under the paper's criteria; it has not been peer-reviewed.

Stanford researchers have a new model that lets a spacecraft practice docking with the International Space Station inside its own mind, Phys.org reports. Instead of trusting camera vision that can fail on approach, the Out-of-this-World-Model lets the craft simulate - dream about - how the docking will go before it commits.

An artificial intelligence model can predict a person's risk of pancreatic cancer up to three years before diagnosis, the American College of Surgeons reports. The model reads routine blood work and health records to flag high-risk patients years earlier than usual practice, when the cancer is more treatable.

The new Boston Dynamics Atlas humanoid attempted a backflip and botched the landing, SmartPlusMedia reports. It calculated the correction in under a second and caught itself instead of falling. The recovery was more impressive than the backflip.